Neither Kadima Nor Likud Can Make Peace With Palestinians

Israel's domestic politics have been thrown into turmoil with inconclusive election results. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni's Kadima Party won 28 seats, just one more than Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party.

Both candidates are claiming victory.

Israel's politicians are an argumentative lot and a leader has seldom been elected outright to the 120-member parliament. But for once almost all Israeli politicians have agreed on something: that the country's election system just does not work.

Weeks of coalition negotiations are almost certain to follow during which Egyptian-led attempts to broker a truce between Israel and Hamas will be frozen. After all, what would be the point in Hamas inking a deal with Israel, if the incoming government moves to overturn it.

Political experts agree that the latest Israeli election results indicate an elaborate shift toward the hard line in the public mood. Rightwing and religious parties won a total of 65 seats, compared to 55 for center-left and Arab parties.

To make matters worse the final say in who will rule Israel might fall to extreme nationalist Avigdor Lieberman whose rightist Yisrael Beiteinu made four gains in the election to hold 15 seats. To give you a perspective here, Israel's Labor Party that ruled the country for decades only managed to win 13 seats.

Therefore the next government will be reluctant to talk peace with the Palestinians, and this will also spoil any chances of success for US President Obama's Mideast peace drive.

Israel's Shimon Perez is not a fan of Netanyahu. Perez has hinted in the past that he considers Netanyahu to possess too volatile a personality to govern with a steady hand, as it were!

Netanyahu wants to expand the illegal settlements. He believes talking peace with Palestinians is a complete waste of time and has vowed to crush the democratically elected Hamas government in Gaza.

Livni on the other hand, says she will continue peace talks with the acting Palestinian authority chief Mahmoud Abbas. But she is likely to allow Israeli settlement activity because she is not really a centrist at all. Livni was one of the advocates and main architects of Israel's 22-day onslaught against Gaza.

Mahmoud Abbas says he is willing to restart peace talks only if Israel commits to a settlement freeze. But realistically speaking, nobody really cares in Israel what Abbas says or indeed whether the man is willing to sit at the negotiating table.

Abbas is a nonentity in the game, the poor fellow!

In the end there is not that much between Livni and Netanyahu. The hardliners have always had the final say in Israeli politics, irrespective of which faction -the rightists, the centrists or the leftists- have been in government.

Israel has an agenda that it does not even attempt to hide anymore. Extremist Jews intend to create a homeland for the entire world Jewry in the Holy Lands. The problem is that the entire world's Jewry number in tens of millions and even if the whole Palestinian population is dislodged from its native homeland of Palestine, there will still not be enough land left to house the world's entire Jewish population.

And there are those who get pedantic with the above ballpark type of argument, but historical facts speak for themselves.

The Arab leaders allied to the West must be aware that their own territories are very much in danger of getting gobbled up. There is a time scale at play here. The main argument might well be to do with Palestine's fate right now, but in Israel's grand scheme of things the moment will arrive for creation of living space for more Jews arriving to claim their bit of the 'promised land.'

Therefore a negotiated settlement between Palestine and Israel is possibly the last thing on any Israeli leader's mind. The idea is instead to skillfully utilize the world media to demonize whoever stands in Israel's way and play for time until 'greater Israel' is a reality.

In domestic Israeli politics, whichever candidate deemed capable of getting away with murder while providing the grounds for stealing yet more Arab land is elected to head the government.

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House, Senate Reach Agreement on Obama Stimulus Bill

It's been cut from to $900 billion to $838 billion to $789 billion, but a version of Barack Obama's stimulus plan appears to have been agreed upon by negotiators from both houses of Congress. Senator Harry Reid told reporters "The differences between the House and Senate versions, we've resolved" in last-minute meetings from which Republicans claim to have been excluded, though Republican Senator Susan Collins was on hand to tell reporters the agreed-upon version had $150 million in spending on infrastructure, which had been a point of contention in the battle over the House and Senate versions. The revised version also contains a provision reducing the number of Americans subject to the Alternative Minimum Tax. Full votes are yet to come, but it would appear the Democrats can win them without Republican cooperation beyond those three moderate GOP Senators, which seems to be the plan. Photo (cc) jdebner.

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Satellites collide near International Space Station above Siberia

Two satellites have collided in outerspace just 500 miles above Siberia. This is evidently the first-ever crash of two intact spacecraft in orbit. The collision also posing a slight risk to the international space station.

"We knew this was going to happen eventually," said Mark Matney, an orbital debris scientist at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

NASA seems to think that the risk to the astronauts and the space station is low, and it won't likely slow down a planned to launch seven new astronauts later this month.

The collision involved an Iridium commercial satellite, which was launched in 1997, and a Russian satellite launched in 1993 and believed to be nonfunctioning. The Russian satellite was out of control, according to the Associated Press .

The Iridium craft weighed 1,235 pounds, and the Russian craft nearly a ton.

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Great big birthday shout-out to Charles Darwin on Regent Street

Charles Darwin was born two hundred years ago today, and On the Origin of Species was published 150 years ago this year. When I first saw this sign the other day, I thought, "Cool -- somebody actually spent money to put up a billboard honoring Darwin."

Then I saw it was promoting an agenda that didn't necessarily have a lot to do with Darwin or evolution, but made use of the language for a catchy slogan: "Evolve beyond belief." The Freedom from Religion Foundation has done some good work in support of the constitutional separation of church and state, but this hardly seems to be designed to promote healthy dialog with the faithful. And while I know they're just trying to be catchy, the idea of evolving "beyond" anything has more to do with the 19th century idea of progress than contemporary evolutionary thinking. Evolution is not about a relentless progression from lower to higher states of being. Evolution is about process, not progress.

Evolution happens. It just is, like gravity. It's accepted in most parts of the world, where religion and evolution coexist without much of a hassle. In America, we just go on wrangling. Believers and nonbelievers brandish Darwin like a club, the better to beat up straw men consisting of oversimplified and distorted caricatures of religion and Darwinism alike. Get a life, people. And let's teach some science in the schools.

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Have We LOST Charlotte?

With a title like that, I suppose anyone trying to avoid spoilers about tonight's episode will have already averted their eyes. But as LOST gets more interesting in all sorts of science fictiony ways, I imagine those who are disliking the disclosure of the series' true genre are getting more and more annoyed. But let's be honest. Unless you couldn't care less about the mysteries raised from the very first season, there had to be a sci-fi component. Hatches and monsters and electromagnetism - it has all been leading here, and if you've come this far, you ought to stay and see what it is the series has been leading towards.

And now, for a recap of highlights. If you've watched it, or can't watch it soon and can't wait to know what happened, here are some of the gloriously interesting moments...

Jin's time-jumping are allowing us the equivalent of flashbacks about Rousseau even though the older Rousseau is no longer there to have them. We learn that the monster is what Danielle believed made Robert and the others "sick". It changed them. "Robert" said the monster is a security system guarding the temple.

Charlotte speaks Korean - and claims to also speak Klingon! After a flash, Charlotte pleads with Jin not to let them "bring her back", because "this place is death". As she gets more and more unstuck in time, Charlotte wonders why daddy can't come with them, and claims to know more about ancient Carthage than Hannibal himself. She also loves Geronimao Jackson - which proved she once lived among the Dharma folks before she came out and said it. Charlotte also tells them that the Orchid will be where the well is. Eventually, she also tells Daniel that she grew up on the island but then her mother moved away with her, and she never saw her father again, and her mother said Charlotte had made up the island. She's been trying to get back ever since - that's why she became an anthropologist. She remembers a 'crazy man' from when she was little, who scared her and told her that if she ever came back to the island she'd die, and she thinks that man was Daniel!

Charlotte appears to die in this episode, although perhaps she is only "mostly dead"! But even if she has died, with all this time-jumping, and the possibility that there are some to whom the rules don't apply, we still may not have seen the last of her.

When John gets underground by going down the well (although a flash makes the well vanish), Christian Shepherd finds him and rebukes him for having not done what he was told: he was supposed to move the island, not Ben. Christian suggests that listening to Ben never brought him any good - yet Christian tells John about Eloise Hawking, who seems to have a better view of Ben. But perhaps Ben has changed over the three years that intervened.

The "donkey wheel" had slipped off its axis - and that might be the reason for the flashes and the skipping around in time.

At the end, we seem to have confirmed for us that Eloise Hawking is indeed Daniel Faraday's mother. And the cliffhanger ending sets the stage for some revelations in next week's episode.

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